Mary Gauthier finds comfort in darkness of ‘The Foundling’

Mary Gauthier hates to use the word “healing.” It’s a fit, but a cheap fit, and the wordsmith in her grimaces at such things.

“Writing and singing these songs, you’d think it would be a bummer,” she said, and she’s correct. “These songs” are the ones that make up The Foundling, an autobiographical song cycle about Gauthier’s experiences as an orphan. (She’ll play songs from that album Thursday night at the Belcourt.)

Those experiences aren’t limited to childhood: As an adult, Gauthier hired a private detective to locate her birth mother, and she eventually contacted the woman, who rejected any notion of a meeting.

“It sounds sad,” she continued, sitting outside a coffee shop on a sunny Nashville day. “But it actually makes me feel better. I play a song, look out at the audience and see people nodding, like, ‘Yeah, me too.’ People who have blood family are going, ‘I know that feeling.’”
Since The Foundling’s May release, Gauthier’s job has been to travel all over the world and sing to audiences about isolation, despair and rejection. She even sings one called “Sideshow” that’s about the singing itself: “Another truly troubled troubadour, writing songs to even up the score/ A tune for every single body blow, and I sing ’em at the sideshow.” Her shows these days find her doing what Tom T. Hall called “telling the untellable.”

The fact that the concerts aren’t exercises in communal misery is testament to the songs and their craftsperson. The healing might not be possible if Gauthier weren’t fussy enough about the details to detest the word “healing.”

“In the end, hopefully it’s a story of just how amazing we are as human beings,” she said. “It’s about how adaptable we are, and how capable of rising above circumstances that on paper look hard. The ‘I’ thing doesn’t really work in songs. I’ll use myself as an example of the human condition, but this is not about me so much as about human nature. It’s in the tradition of the great orphan stories. Like Dickens, but not British.”

The album’s emotional centerpiece is “March 11, 1962,” a poetic documentation of the phone call Gauthier made to her birth mother.

“Hello, this is Mary,” she sings. “March 11, 1962. It took me $500 and 40 years to find you.”

The rest of the song is the rest of the wrenching conversation. And though it seems to be an internal excavation, Gauthier wrote it with Grammy-winning songwriter Liz Rose.

“The song is just what happened, and we wrote it in 10 minutes,” she said. “I was so sad and disappointed and hurt, to finally find my mother and then learn that she doesn’t want to meet me. She can’t meet, because it would blow up her life. She’s lied about having me, no one in her life knows she even has a child. But the sadness was overwhelming.”

At song’s end, though, there is gratitude rather than anger: “I’m not looking to lay blame,” Gauthier sings. “I just had to thank you once before this life went by.”

“It’s primal and complicated and complex,” Gauthier said. “But intellectually, I know it’s not her fault. In the 1960s in the south, the unmarried pregnant woman was a shamed woman in very deep trouble. And she did have me. In the end, she made a supreme sacrifice, and so it just didn’t seem I had the right to be angry.”

That said, she was looking for a different outcome, one that involved physical reconciliation and answers about ancestry. Many adoptees, Gauthier included, are denied access to original birth certificates through laws meant to protect birth mothers’ privacy, and Gauthier has no idea who her father might be, where he might live or whether he’s alive. And yet The Foundling’s ending, Gauthier insists, is happier than what it might seem.

“In the end, it’s good,” she said. “It’s good to continue, to believe in love and to know that human connection saves us. Isolation is death, and art brings people together. People see themselves in it, and they feel less alone, and the artist feels less alone, too. It can either be a bummer, or I can turn it into something useful. I’m a songwriter, so my work does the work.”